Medieval Legal Attitudes Toward Women
The formal 1180 legal definition of a married woman — “every married woman is a sort of infant” — tells you almost everything about medieval English law’s baseline attitude toward women, and the practical consequences were genuinely far-reaching.
On marriage, a woman’s property automatically passed to her husband’s control for as long as he lived. Canon law permitted a husband to beat his wife if he judged her “lazy or disobedient” — not, in fairness, an unlimited licence, since manor court records show neighbours did sometimes intervene when violence seemed excessive, but a real and legally sanctioned power all the same. A wife’s infidelity was judged far more harshly than a husband’s (for the straightforward biological reason that pregnancy made a woman’s infidelity visible in a way a man’s rarely was), and words like “womanish” and “effeminate” functioned as genuine insults against men — Edward II’s perceived effeminacy was actually cited as a contributing factor in the plot that eventually overthrew and killed him in 1327.
Women were formally barred from university, from holding responsible government or legal roles, and — under a 1215 legal reform — even from bringing most criminal accusations to court in their own name, except for a narrow set of cases: their husband’s murder (but only if he died in her arms), the loss of an unborn child, and rape. Manor court records also preserve a wonderfully petty running theme of women fined for “scolding and quarrelling” — one 1449 Yorkshire case shows two women repeatedly fined for arguing with the same third woman, who was in turn fined for arguing back with both of them, a small but vivid snapshot of ordinary village friction being formally logged and monetised by the manorial court system.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.